OUR VIEW: Smart consumer choices foster a cleaner Earth

Sunday

Apr 22, 2012 at 12:01 AMApr 22, 2012 at 10:02 PM

In many communities in southern New England, landfills protrude from the landscape — often among the highest “peaks” on the horizon. Both active and inactive landfills serve as a sad testament to the waste that our communities have accumulated over the years.

In many communities in southern New England, landfills protrude from the landscape — often among the highest “peaks” on the horizon. Both active and inactive landfills serve as a sad testament to the waste that our communities have accumulated over the years.

In Taunton, the city landfill on East Britannia Street has a colorful history of being a necessary nuisance to local residents and firefighters. There were even neighborhood dumps in town, which have all since closed. In its early days, the dump frequently caught fire, filling the air with acrid smoke. Rats were also rant rampant around the landfill. “The fire department was up there all the time,” recalled local historian William Hanna. “Right now, it is 1,000 times better than old days.”

Time for the old landfill, however, is running out. In the mid-1990s, Taunton Municipal Landfill started accepting trash from out of town when Mass Gravel took over its operations. “They put a cover on it,” former Mayor Charles Crowley, also a local historian, said. “They allowed trash from out of town. A lot of the space in the landfill filled up enormously at that point, until it became a mountain. … In the mid-’90s it really started to rapidly increase in size and dimension from that point on.”

Now it’s running out of space. In 1999, Waste Management Massachusetts began operating the city-owned landfill. It is under contract to continue accepting trash until 2016, though the state has only extended a deadline to cap the landfill through March of 2015. The landfill was originally supposed to be capped by next year.

Meanwhile, the institution of Taunton’s Pay-As-You-Throw trash disposal has increased recycling rates. While a combination of PAYT and recycling efforts have begun to divert solid waste that used to end up in the landfill, turning old resources into new, conservation efforts have also been negated by our pervasive “throwaway” culture. Instead of repairing everything from old appliances to shoes, as we used to, these days it’s become cheaper to just throw it out and buy new.

The city is exploring various options for handling the city’s trash when the inevitable landfill closure comes — primarily involving converting trash-to-energy options rather than enduring the $1 million dollar annual expense of hauling trash off site.

Environmentalists and city officials are hoping to develop a “zero-waste future,” in which all solid waste is recycled. The ambitious plan is outlined in the Department of Environmental Protection’s 10-year draft solid waste master plan, but a “zero-waste future,” while admirable, hardly seems realistic.

What happens to the Taunton landfill after its closure is still up in the air. A new trend has begun to emerge in local communities to give old landfills new, green uses. One increasingly popular reuse of closed landfill areas involves recycling the land itself: Transforming it into solar and wind farms to help produce renewable energy and help municipalities generate revenue. In other cases, the land has been cleaned up and transformed into popular recreational areas.
Since the dawn of the environmental movement in the 1970s and the nation’s bedrock environmental laws advanced under former President Richard Nixon, we, as a society, have made many noticeable gains in cleaning up once heavily polluted industrial areas, including restoring rivers that had become multicolored from pollution into healthy habitats for wildlife and recreational purposes.

However, as environmental regulations have increased over the years and signs of pollution are not as visible as they once were, public support for environmental regulation has eroded. Environmental policy has been highly politicized and falsely framed into a battle of the environment vs. the economy. As a society, we need to decide the role of regulation and use our power as consumers to encourage industries to enhance their “green” efforts.

Like most public policy discussion these days, sharp ideological differences have created an atmosphere that fosters little compromise. Environmental policy is best served by using a “carrot and stick” approach that is more palatable to all sides and creates incentives for industries to clean themselves up before taking a tough enforcement approach that can cause economic harm and erode public support for green principles.

The Earth has a finite amount of resources. We should celebrate the gains we have made in cleaning up our environment and continue to advance — not destroy — such efforts. In our own lives, we should all do our part and support recycling efforts and encourage each other to follow the three green principles: Reduce, reuse and recycle. What better day than Earth Day to be reminded of that message. After all, when it comes to the environment, we’re all in this together.